Pac-12 football and basketball: Details on the new TV deal

*** 9:05 a.m. update: The teleconference is just starting. No answers re: distribution during press conference. I hope to get specifics on tele. Check the bottom of this post for distribution info.

Here are some details from the Pac-12 press conference and teleconference on the new TV deal, which goes into effect in 2012-13.

Check back periodically — I’ll have updates over the next 90 minutes or two hours (and over the next few days, for that matter).

The big news up front:

1. Commissioner Larry Scott says that under the new deal with Fox and ESPN, every football and men’s basketball game will be televised, along with most women’s basketball games.

2.Scott also said the $21 million annual revenue for each school will allow schools to reinstate sports that have been cut. (The impact of the new deal on women’s and Olympic sports cannot be overstated.)

3. There WILL BE a Pac-12 Network, in case there was any lingering doubt. It will carry 36 football games, with 44 on ESPN and Fox.

Other news and notes (some of which has been reported on the Hotline previously):

* ESPN exec Burke Magnus: “It was refreshing to have a conversation with a forward-thinking conference.”

* All football and men’s basketball not on Fox or ESPN groups will be on Pac-12 TV and/or digital networks.

* The football championship game will be played on Friday.

* Pac-12 will form the Pac-12 Media Enterprises, which will include TV and digital network and commercial arm.

* Pac-12 network will have strong academic and educational components, including the formation of a “media labs.”

– 10 regular-season football games per year will be on a combination of the ABC and FOX broadcast networks with full national clearance with a substantial commitment for primetime coverage.

– 34 regular-season games on national cable networks, FX, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU.

– The remaining regular-season football games, an average of approximately three games per week, will be featured exclusively on the Pac-12 Network.

– The Pac-12 Football Championship Game, starting with FOX Sports in 2012 (FOX already has rights to the inaugural 2011 game) and then rotating between FOX Sports and ESPN each year. The game will take place on a Friday night primetime.

– The balance of regular-season men’s basketball games, over 120 each year, will be featured exclusively on either the Pac-12 Network or Pac 12 Digital Network.

– The Conference’s men’s basketball tournament (quarterfinals, semi-finals and the championship game) will be shown on ESPN/ESPN2 or FOX Sports/FX. ESPN will broadcast the first basketball championships and then rotate with FOX/FX each year thereafter. The balance of the tournament will be featured exclusively on the Pac 12 Network. Fox Sports Net continues to hold all rights to the 2012 tournament.

– Five women’s basketball games, including the Championship game of the Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament, plus 10 more Olympic sports events, on the ESPN family of networks.

– The Pac-12 Network will exclusively feature approximately another 200 live Olympic sports telecasts across 30 men’s and women’s sports annually.

– The Pac-12 Digital Networks will feature several hundred other live Pac-12 athletic events on an annual basis, not covered by ESPN, FOX Sports or the Pac-12 Network.

– 10 regular-season football games per year will be on a combination of the ABC and FOX broadcast networks with full national clearance with a substantial commitment for primetime coverage.

– 34 regular-season games on national cable networks, FX, ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPNU.

– The remaining regular-season football games, an average of approximately three games per week, will be featured exclusively on the Pac-12 Network.

– The Pac-12 Football Championship Game, starting with FOX Sports in 2012 (FOX already has rights to the inaugural 2011 game) and then rotating between FOX Sports and ESPN each year. The game will take place on a Friday night primetime.

– The balance of regular-season men’s basketball games, over 120 each year, will be featured exclusively on either the Pac-12 Network or Pac 12 Digital Network.

– The Conference’s men’s basketball tournament (quarterfinals, semi-finals and the championship game) will be shown on ESPN/ESPN2 or FOX Sports/FX. ESPN will broadcast the first basketball championships and then rotate with FOX/FX each year thereafter. The balance of the tournament will be featured exclusively on the Pac 12 Network. Fox Sports Net continues to hold all rights to the 2012 tournament.

– Five women’s basketball games, including the Championship game of the Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament, plus 10 more Olympic sports events, on the ESPN family of networks.

– The Pac-12 Network will exclusively feature approximately another 200 live Olympic sports telecasts across 30 men’s and women’s sports annually.

– The Pac-12 Digital Networks will feature several hundred other live Pac-12 athletic events on an annual basis, not covered by ESPN, FOX Sports or the Pac-12 Network.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

* I just asked Scott about Pac-12 Network distribution (Roots/Time Warner LA/etc) : He said details must still be worked out. That will be “phase 2” of this process, he said.

* Scott: High-quality football and basketball content on Pac-12 Network will “minimize distribution fights. We have structured things in a very distributor-friendly” manner.

* Pooling digital and mobile rights allows league to approach distributors “with assets that make (the Network) more appealing.”

* Scott: “We are big believers in the subscription model. Our channel will be available to subscribers … Exactly what tiers we’re on” is TBD.

* Pac-12 TV and digital networks will be available across the country.

* Scott: “If you’re going to be a media company, you have to be authentic and potentially self-critical.”

Jon Wilner

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FOX (network) will have at least 8 Pac 12 football games each regular season, with 4 during prime time. The other 14 will be on FX.

(No more Pac 12 football on FOX Sports Net after 2011.)

FX and/or FOX will only have one quarterfinal, one semifinal, and final of the Pac 12 men’s hoops tourney in even years (2014-2024.) The rest of the games (4 1st round games, 3 quarterfinals, 1 semifinal) will be headed for the Pac 12 Network.

So basically, the Saturday night (7pm PT or later kickoff) Pac 12 football games will move from FOX Sports Net to ESPN2 or ESPNU starting with the 2012 season.

JackBeav

@Otto,
The culture of Pac 10/12 hoops is such that everyone thinks their cities can do it better than LA does. Give them the chance to one-up the pathetic FSN drama in LA, and give all Pac 12 hoops fans a chance to find like fans in what are certainly other destination cities in the west.

By holding a tourney outside our base in Vegas, we showcase Vegas. Vegas is bigger than sport by design. Any non-national tourney is swallowed and forgotten by the place. By holding it in Phoenix or Denver one year and Portland or Oakland the next, we showcase different Pac 12 cultures and provide a street buzz within each city.

The kids who want to grow up rooting for and maybe eventually playing in the Pac 12 are not served by a remote holiday accessible only to monied alums. The league is not served by showcasing a city already known nationally for something other than Pac 12 sports.

JackBeav

“(No more Pac 12 football on FOX Sports Net after 2011.)”

Does the good news ever end with this deal?

Serge

Does the ESPN press release says anything about games on ABC?

OT

Pac 12 basketball TV availability will continue to trail the other leagues starting with the 2012-2013 season:

– 18 regular season games will be on ESPN or ESPN2 (not as many as the ACC, Big East, SEC, Big Ten, or “Conference X”)

– 28 regular season games will be on ESPNU (i.e. 8pm PT on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.)

– 22 regular season games will be on the FOX Sports Net regional networks and affiliates (no guarantee of national clearance due to conflict with local sports.)

– The rest will be on the Pac 12 network (good luck in finding it on your pay TV system.)

elPalo

Larry, please negotiate my next contract.

Pete

@OT
“- 18 regular season games will be on ESPN or ESPN2 (not as many as the ACC, Big East, SEC, Big Ten, or “Conference X”)”

How many basketball games do each of those conferences typically get on ESPN and ESPN2?

alchemist

JackBeav:

Between holding out as much football as we have for the network, having every football game distributed nationally, no more FSN, ESPN as an official partner rather than just sublicensing and the end of the basketball tournament locked in LA I don’t think I could have done much better if ESPN and Fox had come to me and said “Draw up whatever agreement you want, we’ll sign it an give you three billion bucks for it.”

alchemist

I just had an epiphany!

OT is really ex-Pac 10 commissioner Tom Hansen!

You come up with a better explanation for how someone could be so wrong about everything and then look at this new deal and think it’s bad.

Dan

You do need to worry about distribution of the Pac-12 Network the further east you go. The Mountain West channel was mentioned, and they’re a great example. Comcast owns a major piece of that channel (or at least they did), and even they wouldn’t carry on all their systems. So we may have a fight with Comcast.

I’m assuming they’ll handle distribution fees in much the same way the Big 10 Network was thinking — a higher price per subscriber within the conference’s footprint and a rock bottom price elsewhere (like in Georgia) to ensure maximum nationwide coverage. I believe the Big Ten was talking 10 cents per subscriber outside their conference footprint.

JackBeav

The hoops tourney outside of LA isn’t a lock. ESPN reports that TV execs would rather keep it there. That it was discussed means (to me) that Scott wants it to float, like the football CG would. My thought is that Scott wants the league’s fans to be as excited about competing against each other as much as he wants them to be excited about actual competition. We bleed homegrown talent to other conferences every year, and I think it’s because the major population centers within our league have been largely ignored for the glam and glitz of LA. That model has pretty much given kids who would play in the Pac 10/12 the idea that the place to be is LA or some other conference.

Hearing what I’ve heard from a friend at ESPN, many of the on-air talent is very happy to be an official part of Pac 12 sports. Some are excited because of the travel opportunity to the West. Some are from the region themselves. But most were just disappointed from a professional standpoint because Pac 10 coverage absolutely sucked in the East.

I read what OT is typing in his attempt to be a wet blanket, and I can’t help but jump for joy. Everything he types comes out as gold for the Pac 12.

Good luck indeed! More like GREAT SCOTT!

JackBeav

@Dan,
“The Mountain West channel was mentioned, and they’re a great example. Comcast owns a major piece of that channel (or at least they did), and even they wouldn’t carry on all their systems.”

All you had to say was that Comcast ran the MW Network. Common sense extrapolates failure from there.

Otto

Mountain West is not a good example

The Key is that we have HIGH profile games for the P12N.

That is what they learned from the Big 10 network, Big 10 network did not have prime games on their network, which made it hard to get the network going.

alchemist

Otto:

I don’t believe that’s totally accurate.

I could be wrong on this but I believe the way it works for the Big Ten is ABC gets the first choice every week and then there’s a rotation on selection order from there on down. The Big Ten Network gets the second choice three weeks a year, the third choice three weeks a year and the fourth choice for the remaining weeks. Or at least that’s what I recall. So they if that’s true they would have had some marginally high profile stuff. Not a great deal but it wasn’t all Northwestern vs. I-AA team garbage.

JohnSLC

So Jon, I’m curious how you react to Larry Scott telling the mothership that the addition of Utah and Colorado had an “exponential” effect in increasing per-school revenue with the new deal.

Care to eat a little public crow?

OS_Beaver

I think the best for the overall economic benefit and exposure for the conference is to have the Bball tourney in LA 2 years out of 3. Then have 3 other places that get to rotate having in that 3rd year. Essentiallt 3 other cities would get it once every 9 years. Mostly LA for the big media market but also getting other involved some for some spice and to get in in North territory every once in awhile. Us NW schools made the nice sacrifice of losing some LA games and we ought to have it in Portland, located near the border of Oregon and Washington where we could draw all 4 NW schools, every now and then. LA is great media hub but we have to make sure we keep the North/South balance as a priority.

Love our PAC-12 TV/media deal!! The exposure is great!! The facility upgrades that will be taking place in the next 5 years will have us looking pretty incredible soon!

OT

@Serge:

Not mentioned in the press release, but ABC will have only one regular season Pac 12 football game during Saturday prime time each season starting 2012 if you believe the reports out there.

I am assuming that ABC will have the choice of the following:

– Notre Dame @ Stanford or Notre Dame @ USC

(Notre Dame comes west once each season, alternating between Stanford and USC.)

– USC vs UCLA

FOX will have the other 4 Saturday prime time games (in September or November, as FOX is tied up with baseball playoffs in October.)

Serge

@OT:

Thanks, but I’m still wondering if all of ABC and FOX’s games will be in primetime… What about the 12:30pm window?

JackBeav

It makes little sense to keep the Pac 12 Tourney floundering in LA. Does the LA TV market disappear if the tourney happens elsewhere? Empty arenas can be had anywhere in the West. Why not have them where the novelty of a once-in-six-years event is likely to bring out casual fans as well as die-hards from around the league? Why not have them where local kids can come in and foster dreams to one day be a part of a great product whether it be as fans and/or alums or players themselves? Why do we feel the need to enable the TV execs’ sense of laziness?

The rest of the world knows everything there is to know about LA. With increased exposure shouldn’t come some sense of a need to cloister our hoops product there and narrow its perception further.

@JohnSLC,
I’m sure Jon was scoffing at the “exponential” statement because he knew it would only be “arithmetical” at best.

cfn_ms

@JohnSLC: you do realize that Scott has a vested interest in making the Pac-12’s moves look good, right? I don’t we’ll EVER know for sure what the financial impact on a per school basis of adding CU/UU was; it’s not like ESPN/Fox are going to re-bid on it with that structure, and who the hell knows how things would have worked out staying at 10. My personal guess was that it was about a wash. I could certainly be wrong… but again, we’ll never know.

Rudruff

@JohnSLC

I am sure the analysis that proves/disproves the point is somewhere in the Pac-12 offices, but they can’t get at it because it is blocked by a big pile of money.

OT

@Serge:

8 football games on FOX each season, 4 of which will be prime time.

2 football games on ABC each season, 1 of which will be prime time.

Dan

The Pac-10 was never big on playing I-AA non-conference games, at least not until recently. If the league controls the P-12 Network 100%, then they will have a vested interest in offering quality games on it. Hopefully, that will get the FCS schools that nobody wants to see (except the head coach) off the schedules.

Excellent news all the way around. And from what I’ve read, we haven’t even begun to talk about what the P-12 Network will mean revenue-wise. The $21 million per school seems to be only from Fox and ESPN.

alchemist

Serge:

OT has absolutely no clue what he’s talking about. The correct answer to your question is that no one knows yet and no one will. Games get shuffled all the time so there is no way to accurately state right now how many will be where. Take last year’s Oregon/Stanford game. It was originally supposed to be on at 10:15PM EST until the Monday before when it became a #4 vs #9 matchup and it got moved to the ABC primetime slot.

elPalo

In the modern day, what gets broadcast on what network is almost meaningless. I program my DVR for whatever I want to record. 99% of the time the network is irrelevant. The concept of a “network” will only continue to fade with time especially as DVRs proliferate across the country (and they will– how many of you still have a tube TV as opposed to a flat screen?).

Only brainless couch potatoes would watch the same network all day.

OT

The Pac 12 needs to get its hoops tourney out of Downtown LA muy pronto.

Staples Center & LA Live are NOT Madison Square Garden or Times Square. Never have been. Never will be.

If the TV networks insist on keeping the event in LA, at least move it to the renovated Pauley Pavilion so that the event would have some atmosphere prior to the final.

(Having the Pac 12 tourney in the Bay Area would be an even worse disaster. Did anyone notice the 9000+ empty seats at Haas Pavilion for the NIT game in March? )

OT

@Dan:

Having the Big Ten Network did NOT stop the B1G schools from organizing the B1G-MAC “Challenge” in 2010 with 8 B1G schools hosting MAC schools on the same Saturday. (2 B1G schools lost: Minnehaha and Purdon’t.)

==

The PAC 12-WAC “Challenge” is inevitable. Texas State and UTSA in particular are both scheduling PAC 12 schools on the road to pay the bills. San Jose State bused to play at USC in 2009.

So are PAC 12 vs FCS matchups to start the season. (Portland State needs the payday at Oregon. Ditto UC Davis, Cal Poly, and Sac State.)

==
The ESS EEE CEE has perfected the art of scheduling, by having ESS EEE CEE vs FCS “tune ups” during what used to be rivalry weekend (the week before Thanksgiving.) The ESS EEE CEE – Sun Belt “Challenge” is ongoing…

JohnSLC

As I recall, Wilner wrote that he didn’t talk to anyone who said UU and CU added value to the conference. He obviously didn’t talk to one of the people that might actually know. vested interest or not. So, I’ve got to wonder about Wilner’s journalistic methods, or lack thereof.

Mario

I see all sorts of rights and dollars per subscriber issues from all cable providers….here we go again. What guarantee can Larry Scott make on us actually receiving the channel.

Or does he intend that the Pac 12 network actually show the games on FSN channels? Root Sports, Time Warner, etc? Is that the plan?

Eddie Vedder

My thoughts:

Utah and Colorado were valuable for one main reason. Product differentiation. Make the suckers think they’re buying something shiny and new. In the business world this works. It works with your groceries and your vortex bottled beer. Utah and Colorado were hugely important not because of their own intrinsic value, but the value of a brand new shiny Pac. Product differentiation fellas.

Don’t worry so much about distribution issues. Larry Scott has this completely under control and has figured out how to get the distributors to come to him and beg for the channel. There will be opposition for about one week before the distributors realize how valuable it is.

Jason Hernandez

Jon,

There’s only 1 thing I want to know; When does the Pac12 add San Jose State and BYU?

Thanks,
Jason

Jason Hernandez

@ OT

(Having the Pac 12 tourney in the Bay Area would be an even worse disaster. Did anyone notice the 9000+ empty seats at Haas Pavilion for the NIT game in March? )

If San Jose State were a part of it, it would have been a full. This is SJ turf and as soon as the ship gets turned around, (Starting this year?), the viewership should skyrocket.

People in San Jose love a Champion. Now that the NCAA penalties are over there’s a chance to finally have one here in San Jose. That’s why SJSU should have been invited to the Pac12. I for one am full of glee that I get to see the Spartans at full strength. See you in September.

Excuse me? Who’s embarrassing themselves? I am pimping Portland only in the context of once every six years. I am against locating the Tourney remotely (Vegas). And I am for rotation through the new league’s six regions. I’m torn between giving Denver the Tourney once every six years or letting SLC take it every other cycle.

I’ve said as much previously.

Comprehend much?

JackBeav

Edit: themself

Randy

Someone asked how the Big 10 Network selects games and I have answer for you. At least one non-conference game and one conference home game must be shown on the Network. Typically, the BTN shows the game when a MAC school visits a Big Ten school. The football broadcasts are also regionalized. They show more than one game in one window. It is usually an east and west broadcast. I live in Ohio and get either Ohio St. Michigan, Michigan St or Penn St. while to the west Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, etc. are shown.